Month: August 2015

Beautiful Reminder

Jersey

I was asked tonight as we took a short hop from Austin to Dallas if I was ready to get off the plane. I calmly glanced at the woman in the row behind me and replied that I was ok, after all I flew every week. That thought was apparently repulsive to her. She shifted uneasily from foot to foot waiting impatiently to get out of “the small tube”.

As I made a rare appearance in first class an hour later, cause every frequent flyer on the planet out ranks me, I was enthralled by the planes that sat waiting to take off at the end of the long strand of green lights that my pilot followed.

Three huge sleek white tubes sat patiently waiting their turn to chase the yellow lights that guide them skyward. It was the beauty of blue lights framing the steady yellows and greens as the engines throttled, it was the mysterious flashing white lights that seemed to float in mid-air up into the darkness that caught my attention.

It was this thrill of color, of sound, of flight, of beauty the woman on the first flight did not see.

As I watched the few planes in front of us roar to life, it struck me that only a hundred years or so ago, people laughed at the notion of flying like birds, seeing the earth through clouds, city lights, sun rays blinking off the snow covered mountains.

For me it is a weekly occurrence. It is the frequency of my travel that this beauty of sound, color, and imagination become lost in the drudgery of work.

Tonight, I was handed a wonderful gift from a woman that wanted nothing more than to rush off and be on her way. She made me pause for a moment to enjoy the beauty of flight, to remind me of the magnificence of lifting weightlessly off the ground, the symmetry of it all. I am grateful that I have a job that allows me to travel to enjoy all aspects of flying.

I am grateful to the unknown woman who reminded me of the beauty of flying.

Moving On

Jersey

There are several moments in life where you must decide to move on or grow stagnant. I think it is a rare person who is ok with not moving or growing or dreaming. Time to Leave Now describes 5 reasons and times you must move in your life and not only have I moved for all these reasons in my life (more than once), but I have moved for all these reasons in the last 12 months:

  1. To get away from what you know
  2. To find new experiences
  3. To chase love
  4. To escape that love
  5. To begin all over again

When I was twenty a life changing event was thrust upon me (to be truthful it was the second one in my short life, I just didn’t recognize the first one until years and years later). While I was indignant at the time, in hindsight (the perfect vision that it is) it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

The event in my twenties not only fulfilled my desires at the time, but made me the person I am today. While I’m not overly forceful in life, I do know what I want and I usually know how to go get it. I take responsibilities for my actions and reactions, and do my best to be a better person.

My current journey has sent me down a path I never saw even a few years back. I was neither happy nor unhappy. Some people call this content, but that is (in my opinion) stagnant. There are people who recognize stagnation at the time it occurs and go and do something about it, but there are more of us (myself included) that ruminate, think about it, over think it and then realize the time has come to move on.

I either missed the signs that I was to take the other fork in the road or maybe I was content in my sedentary lifestyle. To this day I’m not sure of the answer, but what I am sure of is that if I made the decision to move on sooner a few very good things would not have occurred for me.

I don’t know if it is the Blue Moon or because it is the eve of another round of travels that I sit and reflect on the events of the last few years, but the past keeps poking around inside my head. I found a list I wrote a couple years back as I was parting with my past to bring about what I wanted the future to be. It contains descriptions and the qualities of people I want in my world.

It didn’t matter which area of my life I wanted to change, two things are ever present in each section: Biking and traveling and flying — I guess that’s really three. You may have noticed that I write about those three elements a lot. A friend of mine told me the other night that it was silly, but it was important for her partner to be a biker. I laughed. I didn’t explain why I laughed, but if you look at my writing, my desires, my lists, you will see a common theme: biking (well flying and traveling too).

When I parted ways with my past, one big reason — one important reason to me — was that my partner was not a biker. It is important to me. Several factors are, but number one on the list, okay maybe second, she must be as into biking as I am. I want to be outside and moving and experiencing life on a bike with someone.

I identified with the 5 times in your life you must move on, but the tricky part is not only knowing when to move on, but what you want to move towards. I have notes and lists and ideas of what my life should be, could be, will be. In the last year I moved to get away from what I knew. I moved to a new place half way across the country in order to find new experiences. I was extremely uncomfortable, as I could count on one hand how many people I knew in this area. It was to chase love, even though I don’t know who that is; just instinctually knowing she is where I moved to, while also moving to escape the love that I thought I had for a long time. Most importantly, I moved to begin all over again. I needed to move to find me and return to who I was, which may seem like an oxymoron, but to step back in a place where I knew relatively no one, was the only way to move on.

It was a painful, hard, journey to move on, but I am happier and more fulfilled by doing so.